A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to
announce the February 2015 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the February 2015 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).
One shipped module is known to fail on Parrot (jsonrpc).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
(“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as
“Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2015.02 of theRakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.10.0 of the Parrot Virtual
Machine, version 2015.02 of MoarVM, plus various modules,
documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
community.

https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.02.md

Some of the new compiler features added to this release include:

On MoarVM, symlinks are now followed. This means that e.g. a given path
can have both .l and .d be true, if the symlink points to a directory.
This behaviour now matches the behaviour on the Parrot and JVM backend,
therefore one could consider this a bug fix, rather than an incompatible
change.

Overriding invoke/postcircumfix:<( )> for type coercions (ex. MyType(...))
now passes the function arguments as-is, rather than just passing a Capture
containing them. To get the old behavior, simply declare a Capture
parameter (|c).

6; at unit start is no longer a way to say no strict;. It was deemed
to be a bad meme and huffmannized inappropriately.

Coercion syntax now works in signatures: sub foo(Str(Any) $a) { ... }
will take Any value as its first positional parameter, and coerce it toStr before making it available in $a. Note that Str(Any) can be shortened
to Str().

sub MAIN; (as in, rest of file is the MAIN unit) has been implemented.

The Math::Model and Math::RungeKutta modules no longer ship with Rakudo
Star. They can still be installed with panda.

This is the last Rakudo Star release with support for the Parrot backend,
until volunteers are found that bring the Parrot backend in shape and on par with
the other backends, and implement necessary features for upcoming changes. Seethis blog post for
more information.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

threads and concurrency (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)

Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints

interactive readline that understands Unicode

non-blocking I/O (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo’s
backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many
that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to announce the January 2015 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2015 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail). Three shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (zavolaj (NativeCall), jsonrpc and doc)

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language (“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as “Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2015.01.1 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 7.0.1 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, version 2015.01 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Parrot support will likely be suspended or dropped from future Rakudo and Rakudo Star releases, starting with the February or March releases.

In the next Rakudo Star release, modules Math::RungeKutta and Math::Model will likely be dropped. They can still be installed with panda.

In future, the nqp:: namespace willl only be available after a declaration like `use nqp;’.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

threads and concurrency (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)

Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints

interactive readline that understands Unicode

non-blocking I/O (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo’s backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in the release tarball.

The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-users@perl.org mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

2014.12.1 Patched release and Windows MSI installers available

The version 2014.12.1 contains a fix for the module installer “panda”, which had problems to list installed modules in the previous release. Additionally, the windows prebuilt binaries are available now for download at the same location: http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to
announce the December 2014 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the December 2014 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).
Three shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC,
MIME::Base64 and p6doc).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
(“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as
“Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2014.12 of theRakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.9.0 of the Parrot Virtual
Machine, version 2014.12 of MoarVM, plus various modules,
documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
community.

Some of the new compiler features added to this release include:

$str ~~ s/// now returns a Match or list of Matches (incompatible change)

Supply.lines/words and IO::Handle.words implemented

&indir for scoped directory manipulations

Various performance improvements

Method ‘for’ as an alias for ‘map’. Map will stop flattening the list eventually, ‘for’ remains as it is now

NativeCall now parses library names like libfoo-2.0 and libbar.so.3.3.0.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

threads and concurrency (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)

Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints

interactive readline that understands Unicode

non-blocking I/O (in progress for the JVM and MoarVM backend)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo’s
backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many
that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.

The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-users@perl.org mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to
announce the September 2014 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the September 2014 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.
Windows .MSI versions of Rakudo star for the MoarVM and Parrot backend
are also avaiable in the downloads area.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).
Two shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC and p6doc).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
(“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as
“Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2014.09 of theRakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.7.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, version 2014.09 of MoarVM, plus various modules,
documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
community.

Some of the new features added to this release include:

panda (the module installer client) does work on windows again

panda knows about all modules, that are shipped with this release

./perl6 –profile for MoarVM

Workaround OS X make bug for MoarVM

support for submethod DESTROY (MoarVM only)

optimizations to Str.words, Str.lines, IO.lines, chomp, and return

added experimental support for Proc::Async, MoarVM only for now

Reduced memory size of CORE.setting, improved startup time

startup (on Moar) 15% faster than p5 w/ Moose

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many
that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.

A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to
announce the August 2014 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 2014 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI
version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area
shortly after the tarball release.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).
One shipped module is known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
(“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as
“Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2014.08 of theRakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.7.0 of the Parrot VirtualMachine, version 2014.08 of MoarVM, plus various modules,
documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
community.

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many
that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.

A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to announce the April 2014 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the April 2014 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area shortly after the tarball release.

This is the first Rakudo Star release with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language (“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as “Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2014.04 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.1.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, version 2014.04 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new features added to this release include:

experimental support for the JVM and MoarVM backends

NativeCall passes all its tests on all backends

S17 (concurrency) now in MoarVM (except timing related features)

winner { more @channels { … } } now works

implemented univals(), .unival and .univals (on MoarVM)

added .minpairs/.maxpairs on (Set|Bag|Mix)Hash

Naive implementation of “is cached” trait on Routines

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in the release tarball.

Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.03

A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to
announce the March 2014 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the March 2014 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI
version of Rakudo star is also available at that location.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
(“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as
“Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes [release 2014.03] of the
[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 6.1.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
Machine], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
collected from the Perl 6 community.

The core of Rakudo::Debugger is now part of Rakudo itself and works across all backends.

“make” no longer itemizes its arguments.

for-loops at the statementlist level are now sunk by default.

better parsing of unspaces and formatting codes inside Pod blocks.

Fix for for-loops to be properly lazy

Numerous Pod parsing and formatting improvements

@ as shortcut for @$, % as shortcut for %$

list infix reductions no longer flatten

Numerous compiler suggestion improvements

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star does not support the JVM
nor the MoarVM backends from the Rakudo compiler. While the other backends
mostly implement the same features as the Parrot backend, some bits are
still missing that lead to module build problems or test failures.
We hope to provide experimental JVM-based and MoarVM-based Rakudo Star
releases in April 2014.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many
that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.

Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2014.01

A useful, usable, “early adopter” distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to
announce the January 2014 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2014 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI
version of Rakudo star is available in the downloads area as well.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
(“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as
“Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2014.01 of theRakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 5.9.0 of the Parrot Virtual
Machine, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
collected from the Perl 6 community.

https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2014.01.md

Some of the new features added to this release include:

The eval sub and method are now spelled EVAL

Numeric.narrow to coerce to narrowest type possible

Can now supply blocks with multiple arguments as sequence endpoints

Method calls and hash/list access on Nil give Nil

This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error
reporting and better failure modes.

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star does not support the JVM
nor the MoarVM backends from the Rakudo compiler. While the other backends
mostly implement the same features as the Parrot backend, many bits are
still missing, most prominently the native call interface.
We hope to provide a JVM-based and MoarVM-based Rakudo Star releases soon.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many
that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I’m happy to announce the December 2013 release of “Rakudo Star”, a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the December 2013 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area shortly after the tarball release.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language (“Perl 6″) and specific implementations of the language such as “Rakudo Perl”. This Star release includes release 2013.12 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 5.9.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new features added to this release include:

The Whatever Star (*) now works inside chain operators like comparisons.

Private attributes from roles are now visible in the classes they apply to.

Memory and speed improvements for ListIter and List.combinations, respectively.

Improvements to the execution of regexes.

This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error
reporting and better failure modes.

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star does not support the JVM
backend from the Rakudo compiler. While the JVM backend mostly implements
the same features as the Parrot backend, many bits are still missing,
most prominently the native call interface.
We hope to provide a JVM-based Rakudo Star release soon.

The following notable features have been deprecated or modified from previous
releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are planned to be
removed or changed as follows:

All unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes. In the future, those operators and methods that are defined “nodal” will behave like a one-level map.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we’ve tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn’t implemented, but there are many that we’ve missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in the release tarball.